JOHN DEMPSTER: This is one reason why the story of Easter is so relevant

Listening to Martin Haworth speak, I was awakened once more to the significance of Easter.

Martin was in Inverness to promote his new trilogy, Z-Rod – which tells the epic story of the coming of Christian faith to northern Scotland in the time of the Picts.

There was goodness in the life of these Picts – love and joy and closeness to nature – but also the darkness of fear. Fear of demons, fear of the dead, fear of the capricious goddess the Bulàch. The Irish Celtic saints came with good news of a new way of being, centred on Jesus Christ.

In writing the trilogy, Martin drew on his experiences as a Christian missionary in the Philippines in the 1990s. He and his wife lived with mountain tribes just emerging from the Iron Age, and were troubled by fears similar to those of the sixth-century Picts. Martin and Alexandra helped them through prayer, Christian teaching, social care and community development.

All this seems far removed from 21st century Scotland. And yet, we too are no strangers to fear. The climate emergency, Covid and its aftermath, the threat of nuclear war, major social problems in the UK – all trigger deep anxieties.

We don’t talk much about demons (or perhaps demons shape-shift to blend in to different cultures), but we have our own sources of oppression. So many of us find ourselves ensnared by things like alcoholism, guilt, despair, pornography and much else.

This is one reason why the story of Easter is so relevant. The day of Jesus’s death and the day which followed plunged his first followers into despair, for all their hopes had disintegrated. But on Easter Sunday morning they discovered Jesus had risen from death. Their faith was reborn, and strengthened through an enlarged sense of who Jesus is, and the lengths God was prepared to go out of love for us.

When people believe in the good news about Jesus, the living God who has overcome death, who is more powerful than the combined forces of evil, when people bring to him needs unfulfillable elsewhere, demons are overcome and joy breaks through, a joy which leaves no room for fear.

Now I know Christians are not exempt from times of doubt and desolation. I know some Christians suffer because of harmful encounters with churches. I know we don’t all experience Easter Sunday joy on the designated day each spring, but for most of us times of desolation give way to days of profound happiness.

On the banks of the Ness in Pictish times, in mountain villages in the Philippines, across the world this Sunday people will again be saying ‘Yes!’ to Jesus, the ‘Yes!’ in which sins are forgiven, and freedom found.

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